The Three Most Disgusting, Psychotic Things from the NRA Convention

Picking up where I left off yesterday, the existence of the Second Amendment offers a patina of nobility, entitlement and providential sacrosanctity to psychotic behavior. The Second Amendment enables the gun culture and legitimizes an otherwise lunatic fringe lobbyist outfit, the NRA.

Due to this misinterpretted and obsolete line in the Bill of Rights, which, in the modern sense, defends the human right to buy a deadly product from a store, too much of our society looks upon gun hobbyists with resigned deference. Congress and the president are satisfied with “gun control” legislation with titles like “Second Amendment Rights Protection Act.” Activists too often concede to the applicability of the Second Amendment when it should be laughed off as a quaint relic of colonial Americana.

Everyone’s afraid to appear too “extreme” when discussing gun control legislation. No one wants to offend the gun people. But extremism never stopped the NRA and the utter wackadoodles and firearm fetishists lurking in plain view — their American flag shirts and ridiculous bumper stickers flaunting their “right” to buy and keep as many guns as they can afford, and to use them in a wide variety of inexcusably psychotic ways.

Over the weekend, the NRA held their annual convention in Houston — coincidentally the same city where, last week, a man walked up to the security area of an airport terminal with the intention of mowing down travelers with his constitutionally-protected AR-15.

Suffice to say, there were dozens of awful and ridiculous things on display at the convention center, but I’d like to discuss what I believe are the three most disgusting things from the event — all of which are baked into our gun culture and enabled by the Second Amendment.

Exotic Game Hunting Vendors

There were many of these shady companies in attendance but the most visible vendor, Sporting International, offers vacations to Africa for the purpose of killing exotic animals. The only thing more insane than earning a profit with such an endeavor are the people who are willing to pay upwards of $31,000 to kill these animals for no other reason than to watch them die. This is behavior worthy of institutionalization, as far as I’m concerned. Anyone who pays cash money to journey to Africa to gun down a lion or a giraffe should be locked up because, seriously, these people are somewhere on the serial killer spectrum, and I would wager they’re barely containing their desire to hunt people for sport, too.

Hunting for food with so much healthy food readily available is questionable behavior to me, but hunting game for sport isn’t sporting at all and anyone who does so not only possesses a twisted hatred and disrespect for nature but a mentally unstable, narcissistic desire to inflict death upon creatures that don’t deserve it. Worse yet, many of the animals listed on Sporting International’s menu are nearing the endangered category: leopards, lions, elephants — mythic storybook animals that exist in dwindling ranges.

Yet if Cletus McDinkydick has few thousand dollars, he can go to Uganda and kill a rhino. Or he can go to South Africa and kill a lion. And then, like the psychopath he is, he can have his picture taken with the corpse — his shit-eating face aglow with orgasmic delight over killing a rare and noble animal (from a safe distance). But instead of keeping an incredulous eye trained on these guys as potential serial killers who, once the thrill of killing animals fails to satisfy their blood lust, will begin to assemble a suit made of human skin in their crawl spaces, we enable this behavior with our deference to the gun culture. Gun owner or not, all of us should be shaming these people. We should be stripping them of their over-inflated sense of masculinity — and that goes double for escaped mental patient Ted Nugent who exalts in the death porn of exotic game hunting as well.

The Obama Targets

Yes, there were several President Obama shooting targets for sale at the NRA convention. And no, the people who put them on display weren’t arrested, nor were the yokels who bought them. One of the targets was paper, but two of them (that I’m aware of) were three-dimensional effigies. Zombie Industries, one of the Obama effigy vendors, removed its Obama target (shown above) from its booth — and, no, they didn’t suffer a brief pang of human decency, they were asked to do it for obvious reasons. Regardless, pretending to shoot the president (any president) should summarily disqualify anyone from owning a firearm, and it should ultimately beg a visit from the Secret Service. But take President Obama’s likeness out of the equation and the psychotic behavior remains: pretending to shoot any human being — a celebrity, another politician or just anybody — represents behavior that falls within similar territory as killing animals for shits and giggles. Serial killer territory.

This leads us to…

“The Ex” Shooting Target

The same company that made the controversial Obama target also manufactures a target called “the Ex” — obviously, “ex-girlfriend.” The buxom life-size figure retails for $99 and actually bleeds as gunmen fill it with lead. Clearly, this is meant to satisfy an unfulfilled and homicidal hatred for women. Again, our light touch — our inability to get tough with the gun culture breeds this kind of maniacal, misogynistic behavior. As for the mouth-breathing self-identified badasses who think it’s awesome to shoot at a bleeding effigy of a woman, don’t screech and poop your camo-pants when they come for your guns, because if there’s anyone who should be disarmed and counseled by expert psychologists it’s you. And if this behavior is motivated by a need to flaunt your political incorrectness and to piss off “Feminazis” and “libtards,” congratulations, you just earned the admiration of other micro-phallic, woman-hating, right-wing dickbags who will never enjoy a healthy relationship with an actual real life self-respecting woman. Nor should you. According to a pair of studies, “Between 30 and 40 percent of women murdered in the US each year are killed by a current or former intimate partner. In over half of these cases, the perpetrator used a gun. Put another way: Of women killed with guns, almost two-thirds are killed by their intimate partners.”

The NRA convention is ground zero for the gun culture — the gun culture mainstream. Certainly the exotic game hunters and effigy-target shooters don’t represent all gun owners or even NRA members, but they’re rarely discouraged by gun owners with more balanced brain chemistry. Those of us outside the gun culture aren’t without guilt either. When we allow gun ownership to enjoy a status far greater than what it deserves, this is the kind of grotesquely entitled and socially retarded behavior it breeds. Gun zealots believe they have a God-given human right to act like this because there’s an item about state militias in the Bill of Rights and, over time, it’s been extrapolated and bastardized into a slagheap of mentally ill, over-compensatory crapola — a cloak of invincibility for maniacs, chickenhawks and death pornographers who get off by pretending to shoot humans while, too often, shooting living creatures for no other reason than the adrenaline rush of watching something bleed out.

can’t someone smarter and more inventive than me get working on an ap for that?

Wish fulfillment. A gun isn’t an electronic device like a cellphone you can stop from a distance with a scrambler of some sort. It’s mechanical and to make it stop working you’d have to get up close and physically mess with the mechanism.

But, gosh it sure is easier to just wish someone will solve the problem for us with a cheap electronic invention that actually make the effort ourselves to counter the gun lobby.

GeneralLerong

Gosh, you’re so much smarter and better informed about guns than I am. And I did not know that I had to make a choice between inventiveness and lobbying, silly me thought it was OK to do both.

Christopher Foxx

Gosh, did I hurt your feewings? So sorry, didn’t mean to.

kdb

Ohh yea & what if said “bad guy” had one of these & blocked the cops guns ability to fire? ooh whoops! yea then no one could stop him/her. Since that would be sooooo much better!

Brett Baylis

The NRA is a bunch of ignorant white fascists who believe they can join forces with white supremacists-many of whom were spooted at this NRA convention-and bring about a coup against the U.S. goverment.Aside from the utter idiocy of their beliefs,they are also deranged and insane,and should be considered for the sort of detention the Boston Marathon bomber may recieve.Of course,being white “Christian” men,we know THAT will never happen,right?

http://www.facebook.com/hugos.lavia.37 Hugo S LaVia

I’ll continue to post this, it ain’t costing me anything:

From “The West Wing” Season 2,
Episode 7:

SKINNER:
You know, I never understand why you gun control people don’t all join the NRA. They’ve got two million members. You bring three million to the next meeting… call a vote… All those in favor of tossing guns – [Snaps fingers] – Bam! Move on.

JOSH :
That’s a heck of a strategy, Matt. I’ll bring that up in a meeting.

PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THIS TO ALL LIBBIE SITES. LET’S GET 5 MILLION PEOPLE TO JOIN THE NRA.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=663669914 Sean Richardson

The problem with this strategy is that it assumes that the NRA listens to its members. The NRA membership now is currently 90% in favor of more laws than the NRA itself supports.

I made this same suggestion back in January, but the recent elevation of a bircherite to the NRA presidency suggests that it isn’t the members who get to vote on the leadership of that group. Such an outlook has always been a minority in this country, so they must have a closed election process in place.
Who does get to decide who the NRA leaders are I wonder?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=663669914 Sean Richardson

As far as I can tell, the NRA membership votes people onto the “NRA board” [Ted Nugent and Oliver North got the most votes, last time]. Then the board elects somebody who is technically the president of the board but is consistently referred to as the president of the NRA. And the NRA pays those board members to go out and speak at NRA events. I guess those dues have to pay for something.

Christopher Foxx

The problem with this strategy is that it assumes that the NRA listens to its members. The NRA membership now is currently 90% in favor of more laws than the NRA itself supports

And yet there is zero movement among the rank and file to change the NRA’s policies.

The NRA doesn’t listen to its members because they aren’t saying anything.

http://www.twitter.com/bobcesca_go Bob Cesca

The NRA doesn’t care about the opinions of its rank and file members. It’s primarily concerned with lobbying for the gun industry.

“Gun zealots believe they
have a God-given human right to act like this because there’s an item about
state militias in the Bill of Rights and, over time, it’s been extrapolated and
bastardized into slagheap of mentally ill, over-compensatory crapola”

That’s the heart of the matter right there. The second amendment was never about individual rights to own anything; it in fact refers to military service. The NRA has been redefining the second amendment for my entire life, when I was a teen and began getting interested in the gun control issue, I was of the opinion that the second amendment should be overturned because it was no longer viable…then I actually read the whole amendment, not just the second sentence that the NRA focuses on as if there isn’t a whole sentence before that one. This was in the early 90s and it showed me exactly what kind of an untrustworthy, lying organization the NRA had become. The NRA started out as a club to promote marksmanship in 1871, and for their first 100 years that’s pretty much all it was. By the mid 70s they had been taken over by far right zealots who were of the “overthrow the government” crowd.

I call the NRA the most useless organization in America, but they have accomplished one thing, they have managed to convince many that the second amendment is for individual rights.

Christopher Foxx

not just the second sentence that the NRA focuses on as if there isn’t a whole sentence before that one

It’s worse than that. The 2nd Amendment is only one sentence long, and the gun nuts only quote the second half. They have to keep the focus on just a fragment.

GrafZeppelin127

To be fair, they focus on the Second Amendment’s independent clause. The last 14 words could be a complete sentence if they were written that way. The first 13 words don’t contain a verb; the word “being” is a participle that functions as an adjective, and therefore don’t contain the subject of the sentence.

But, then again, a lot depends on how the Amendment is punctuated, i.e., where the commas are…..

Christopher Foxx

True.

delosgatos

It’s even worse. The purpose of the “well regulated militias” was to prevent and/or put down slave revolts.

GrafZeppelin127

What we’re seeing is the mythologization of an ordinary consumer product, and ordinary property rights. Gun fans mythologize guns, they mythologize gun ownership, and they mythologize themselves. They’re the heroes of their own private mythology.

One of the reasons why gun fans resist and object to the idea of the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms” being a property right and not a civil right is that they simply can’t, won’t, or don’t want to recognize the cynicism of the NRA and the gun industry who use the Second Amendment as an advertising slogan to sell their deadly wares. All they have to do is put out an impressive-looking gun, say that Obama and the liberals want to and are about to “ban” it, and sell it at a 5000% markup to ignorant rubes who will buy whatever they are ordered to buy, because the mere act of buying it makes them feel heroic.

The “rights” that gun fans perceive go beyond keeping and bearing their precious Arms. They believe they have a “right” to do all the heroic things they imagine themselves doing with those Arms.

There’s no way this ends well.

kfreed

I couldn’t agree more. I was recently a guest at a candidate “meet and greet” hosted by individuals who apparently have more money than brains. What led me to this conclusion was the proliferation of stuffed wildlife scattered around the main room (there was a stuffed lion stationed directly behind my seat). Words cannot describe how disgusted I was upon entering this abode. Had I not been driven there by an acquaintance, I would have turned around and gone home.